What is Third Party Governance?

RSA Archer Third Party Governance provides organizations the capability to monitor and manage the performance of the third parties with whom they do business.

 Why is the proper management of Third Party performance so important?

Organizations are increasingly using third parties to support their operations and to deliver products and services to their clients. Every organization entering into a third party relationship has expectations regarding how the third party’s product and services should perform.  It is particularly critical that third parties provide satisfactory performance wherever they are supporting customer-facing activities or contribute to the organization achieving its key objectives. Often performance expectations are formalized via contract by way of agreed-upon service level metrics unique to the product or service being delivered by the third party.   While contractually establishing service level metrics is a best practice, it is only the first step.  Organization’s need to monitor performance metrics throughout the life of each third party relationship and manage deteriorating third party relationships at the earliest possible time.  While an organization may have created some contractual recourse should a third party fail to perform, litigation and financial compensation do not solve the problems posed by underperforming third parties.  The best outcome is represented by third parties that live up to or exceed performance expectations.

RSA Archer Third Party Governance

RSA Archer Third Party Governance provides the capability to track the performance of individual third party engagements and to measure the performance of third parties across all of the engagements they are delivering to your organization. Third Party Governance provides the ability to document and track service level agreement metrics, and utilize a metrics library to promote consistency in assigning service level metrics to similar engagements.  Once performance metrics are established, actual performance data can be collected from named individuals or automatically via systems of record.  Stakeholders can be automatically notified if a third party’s performance begins to fall outside acceptable boundaries so that third party performance can be coached back to acceptable levels or remediation and contingency plans created and executed should the third party’s performance become irreparable.

Key features include:

• Define and document performance metrics for third parties
• Track all contractual service level agreement (SLA) metrics
• Uncover deteriorating third party performance
• Capture and monitor remediation plans until performance problems are resolved
• Create performance metrics and associate them with individual product and service engagements
• Capture performance metric data on an ongoing basis and score performance based on data collected
• Report on performance of individual product and service engagements
• Roll up engagement level performance to obtain overall third party performance profile

RSA Archer Third Party Governance enables organizations to:

• Create and capture performance metrics and associate them with individual product and service engagements on an ongoing basis
• Report on performance of individual product and service engagements and roll up engagement level performance to obtain an overall third party performance profile
• Uncover deteriorating vendor performance and quickly resolve third party performance problems
• More frequently exercise contract remedies due to poor performance
• Avoid third party-related surprises and losses, and spend less time and money on third party performance remediation
• Demonstrate the effectiveness of third party performance management programs to executive management and regulators

Today, organizations are faced with complex and fast moving challenges exacerbated by the very nature of rapidly expanding third party relationships.  RSA Archer Third Governance is one element of an effective Integrated Risk Management program.  Stressing the agility and flexibility needed by today’s modern organizations, integrated risk management brings together the various domains of risk across business activities (horizontally), connecting the activities to the strategies and objectives of the organization on an aggregated basis (vertically). This approach to risk management provides leaders with the most holistic understanding of risk facing their organization so they can make truly informed decisions about where to deploy limited capital and human resources to produce optimized returns for the organization while maximizing the likelihood of achieving the organization’s objectives.

As your organization drives business growth through an extended ecosystem strategy, your third party risk and performance management program must evolve and manage risk more holistically, with more agility and integration than before. Managing third party risk and performance is one ingredient to showing real progress and improvement and decreasing business risk.  RSA Archer can help your organization better understand and manage its third party relationships on one configurable, integrated software platform. With RSA Archer solutions, organizations can efficiently implement risk management processes using industry standards and best practices and significantly improve their business risk management maturity.

For more information, visit RSA.com or read the Datasheet.